The Problem with Healthy Food Porn

As any Instagram lover can attest, unhealthy foods (think: greasy macaroni and cheese, sugar-filled cake pops, and pretty much anything wrapped in bacon) get a lot more Internet time than do healthy ones.

A new website from Bolthouse Farms (a company that sells products like smoothies, juices, dressings, and carrots) is out to change that. The aptly named FoodPornIndex.com tracks 24 food-related hashtags—half healthy, half not so much—in real-time. Why? So you can see how many people are sharing them at any given moment. Today’s hashtags include #candy, #melon, #pie, and #kale, among others.

When we checked for this article, a whopping 71.6 percent of food porn being shared online was of the unhealthy variety, according to the site. And it was a particularly sad day for #beets, which were coming in dead last (among the items tracked by the site), with only 342,815 moment-by-moment shares. Meanwhile, #pizza was rocking the Internet will more than 9 million shares.

While the site doesn’t go so far as to tease out healthy #snacks, #burgers, and other foods from the grease-soaked kind (check out these healthy snack ideas and six bikini-friendly burgers), the site’s a pretty good reminder that we seriously need to rehab our food porn problem. After all, fruits and veggies can be beautiful, too! (The site goes as far as to encourage visitors to start posting more pictures of healthful foods to “make every #FoodPorn count” and “change the imbalance.”)

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